[Opensim-dev] weird idea #1: lightweight agent/ spectator

[Dahlia Trimble]

I thought that the biggest contributors to agent related overhead were the
object updates and asset downloads that had to be sent to each viewer - not
sure that a "simple observer" would reduce that overhead all that much.
Perhaps if these data transfers could somehow be offloaded from the host
that was managing the scene, some sort of "sharding" but only scene content
and updates, and let the clients still send their individual updates to the
main host? This may accomplish something similar to what you are describing.

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 2:21 AM, Dirk Krause <dirk.krause at pixelpark.com>wrote:

> One problem with SL that is addressed quite often is the limited number
> of AVs that one region can hold ('the number of people on an island').
>
> This comes up in the 'big number' discussion and especially in nearly
> every meeting scenario that is of high interest to the community.
> Somehow this is also influencing the 'relevance of SL' (and thus
> OpenSim)technology and grid technology in general ('I can have hundreds
> of people in a Habbo place but only around 50 in SL')
>
> I really want to dodge the official 'big numbers' discussion by stating
> what would happen when there would be hundreds of people in one IRC
> channel and all of them were writing at the same time. But I do believe
> that one viable 'big number' scenario is a podium discussion where a
> couple of persons are discussing and most of the other people are
> listening/watching/reading in general. Or a sports event of sorts, with
> - well :-) - 22 people acting and many more watching.
>
> So what I think what would be valuable is a 'lightweight agent'
> construction. This would be an AV that basically can't do much except
> listening/watching/reading, she especially couldn't rezz anything. It's
> a bit like the 'spectator mode' in some games. This way there could be
> big numbers of watchers, thus giving more people the opportunity to
> attend a meeting - practically increasing the number of virtual beings
> in a region, without bringing the region down.
>
> I could think of at least two ways to acchieve this:
> - a camera woman AV that 'lightweight agents' could hook up to, using
> the client only as a viewer; this would be a bit like a video stream,
> just with less impact, since the rendering is still done in the viewer.
> - a stripped down agent that got rid of everything that causes too much
> stress on either network or server. Unfortunately I don't know how to do
> that because I don't know the OpenSim construction enough. These
> lightweight agents could have a representation (a sphere?) while they
> are online, a distinct place and the ability to look around and maybe
> move slowly.
>
> By having something like that we could get rid of the 'theres just a
> small number of AVs in every region' dilemma.
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